Machina Viva (7 page)

Eve checked her power level and decided that it would have to do. She withdrew from the charging booth and started walking. Then, she began to run, away from the charging station, away from the theater, and most of all away from her apartment.

The Security troubleshooter watched from his perch, uncertain of its next move. For the first time in years, it was taken by surprise.

13

The bulletin flashed simultaneously to every screen in Tetropolis, both public and private. Most people in the city were asleep, either the low-activity state of a charging robot or the hallucinogenic unconsciousness of humans, so they wouldn’t see the bulletin until the morning. A handful of people around the city were awake, though, and saw it right away.

One of them took special note of the bulletin. He watched the bulletin a second time, playing back the snippets of surveillance footage and recording them in minute detail. Thus apprised of what had transpired at the transit station, he exited his room through the window and made a beeline, or more accurately a catline, for the theater.

From his perch among the support struts above the transit station, Brian could see officials from the Transportation department milling around collecting evidence. He crept around over their heads, looking for the spot where his view of the station platform matched the angle of the footage he’d seen in the bulletin.

The camera was well hidden, disguised as something that only a human architect would have thought interesting, but its sightline to the transit station was identical to the published surveillance footage. Brian examined the camera’s housing beneath the surface and located the cable, but this was a government device. Its designers had not designed it so that just anyone could unplug the wire and gain access. Fortunately, Brian was not just anyone. He wrapped his tail around the cable to leach the signal from its electromagnetic field, enabling him to download the camera’s recent footage.

He leapt from his perch and crept to the gap in the struts where Eve had flown after being hit by the train. He could see the scuff marks where her limbs had bounced off of the pillars of the city. As he watched the platform, he replayed the surveillance footage from this new angle, watching the ghost image of Eve fly past him and out into the city. As she left the station, she vanished, replaced in Brian’s mind with a projection of her trajectory. The arcing line flew over the city, and Brian followed its path as the glow of the
Zeitgebers
ushered the city from night into day.

14

“So I went to the spot where she landed, and I could see the cracks in the pavement. The Infrastructure guys covered them up pretty well, but you can still tell. And I did the math based on her trajectory, so I know how fast she was going, but without her body mass, I don’t know exactly how hard she hit when she landed.”

Morning had well and truly risen, and Tetropolis had awakened to a new day. The bulletin about Eve was the talk of the town, including the part of it that sat within the walls of the Crownstone facility. The bulletin was the first thing Lucy, Will, and Raymond had seen, and Brian’s urgent message asking for a meeting was the second thing. They were all gathered again around the table in Raymond’s apartment, and Brian had just told the others about his investigative efforts.

“Never mind the math,” said Will. “I’ve performed hits like that in pictures before, by which I mean that I’ve had an object approach me at speed and stop, and then I get launched into a crash pad by a controlled mechanism. And I can take some abuse and walk away from it, but I still needed pretty regular maintenance after a strenuous capture session. A hit like that by a real train into a real building? Not only should every load-bearing member in her body have been fragmented, but her vital systems should have been wrecked beyond repair. She should have lost power in a few minutes and been nothing but a pile of scrap by the time HPW found her.”

“It appears that someone has designed a robot that is capable of considerably more than any that has come before,” said Raymond.

“Three guesses as to who that might be,” said Brian.

“It seems that we have found Philip’s secret project,” said Lucy.

“Hold on,” said Will. “If his project was to make an indestructible robot, why would he have kept it secret? Something like that would have had the exploratory or protective services climbing over each other to get bids in. Besides, he said that he though his project would change everything.”

“What about some kind of self-healing capability?” said Brian. “I heard once that Robot Production had tried playing around with that.”

“Not so much ‘healing’ as redundant backup systems, actually,” said Lucy. “And anyway, if Philip had designed a successful auto-repair system, he could have perfected it in the lab and sold it as a cosmetic upgrade or something. Or else he could have implemented it publicly on a wider scale, say in a hundred robots, and gotten a commendation and a healthy bonus from his bosses.”

“Exactly,” said Will. “Again, he wouldn’t have needed or wanted to keep a development like that secret.”

“Well, Eve must have had something that let her walk away from a train crash,” said Brian. “If she couldn’t either resist or recover from the damage, how did she do it?”

“Oh, she must have had one of the two,” said Will. “But that can’t be all of it. If Philip gave Eve the ability to survive an impact like that, it must have been a side effect.”

“A side effect?” said Brian. “What’s the main attraction? Mind reading?”

“That’s what we have to find out,” said Raymond. “Security already took Philip in, and now Health and Public Welfare are looking for his creation. Whoever in the cabinet is taking an interest in their affairs will not have Philip’s own goals in mind, which means that we in turn must. We will have to track down Eve and discover exactly why she is so important to all of us.

“Lucy, you will need to do what you can to locate Eve. It will be best to start at her lodgings.”

“She won’t be there,” said Lucy. “Not with so many people looking for her.”

“Of course not. However, she may have left some evidence behind. Go there and see what you can learn. Will, you will need to go to Philip’s office and uncover what you can about his project.”

“No problem. I ought to be able to make up an innocent enough face for the job.”

“Brian, it will be your job to locate Philip within the Security building. Do whatever you can to pinpoint his location without compromising your own safety.”

“Brian,” said Lucy, “you get all the fun stuff.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. “A daring adventure in the wonderful world of undercity crawlspaces.”

“I’ll ask Mrs. Whitlow to prepare an extra-soft cushion for you,” said Raymond.

“I’ll need it.”

15

In the beginning, there were the ships. All of humanity traveled through empty space in search of anything that could support their existence. Long beyond the edges of their star maps, they drifted blindly through the universe hoping to stumble upon a planet, asteroid, or indeed anything other than parsec after parsec of vacant blackness. A few small asteroids were encountered, but they were barely more than fragments of rock, barely large enough to sustain a gravity well, let alone an atmosphere. They were gathered by the mining vessels and brought to the mineral refinery ship to be powdered and stored, and the ships moved on.

After generations of humanity had resigned themselves to a wholly shipboard culture, long-range sensors detected an anomaly: a nearly spherical volume of gas with a composition nearly identical to that of their own atmosphere. The cosmologists on the main ship could not determine how the gas maintained its shape, nor could they explain the temperature readings from within the cloud, which remained at a constant range that fell neatly within human tolerance levels. Even if conditions within the cloud had not been so perfectly suited for human survival, the presence of the anomaly would have warranted further study. Given that the cloud contained an environment seemingly tailor-made for human propagation, however, the inhabitants of the ships deemed the discovery nothing less than a miracle of providence.

The ships were brought into the cloud, and the mass of humanity breathed fresh air for the first time in their lives. Construction crews set to work adapting the ships to their new environment. The systems that had sustained them in deep space could now be retrofit for new purposes. Massive structures were built, and the ships were turned inside out, opened up to let the vapor in. The main ship of the fleet rose on its new flotation pylons and became Tetropolis, the first of the great arcologies. The refinery ship still sent out the smaller mining vessels to recover the occasional bit of rock for mineral harvesting, but now it could send them within the vapor to scout for whatever might have been drawn in before their arrival. Outposts were established throughout the vapor to manage the tangled web of communications between the scout ships and the main refinery, which eventually settled itself in the upper layers and became Ikosia, the glorious mining nerve center of the new human settlement. Eventually, they would manage to gather enough minerals to begin construction of Fullerton, and by then, the harsh realities of their shipbound origins would be forgotten by all but historians and the pathologically nostalgic.

As more and more arcologies were built in the vapor, travel between them became ever more important. Port facilities are a simple enough thing to add to a city that floats in the air, but complications arise when the inhabitants of a city speak up, saying that although intercity commerce is a fine thing for the well-being of all, they don’t want to have to watch. For far too many people, the products of the kelpers and herders do not arrive on large, unsightly factory ships; they arrive on a serving tray. This means that the Tetropolis docks are located beneath the city itself, with the associated warehouses and other service buildings in the very bottom layer of the structure.

In support of the vapor transport culture, a new class of establishments cropped up in the lower levels of the city to give them access to beds, food, and entertainment. They were cheap and simple, because the shipboard lifestyle does not attract the sort of person with lofty standards. What none of the proprietors in this infra-city anticipated, however, was the vast population above that appreciated the occasional break from the urbane gentility of the upper levels. As soon as word spread through Tetropolis of all the fascinating squalor that existed beneath their feet, swept under the rug like so much dust, the dockside bars and gambling houses began to see an influx of people with money in their pockets, people who wanted more than simply a hot meal and a bed. The newly christened Shadowtown became a popular retreat for anyone who wanted to leave the bright city lights behind and live on what they innocently called the edge, while the roughnecks from the ships sat and chuckled from behind their cheap drinks.

Nobody really lived in Shadowtown. Most of the topside clientele only spent a few hours down there, and the ships were only in port for a day or two at a time. The people who owned property down there had apartments elsewhere. If anyone stayed there for more than a week at a time, it was because they were hiding.

It was the only place for Eve to go.

If she was going to be able to disappear, then she would need to alter her appearance. But she couldn’t go back to her rooms for anything, and if she bought anything on her card, she might as well stand in front of the Security building wearing a sign saying “I Am Eve, Please Catch Me.” So the first place she found in Shadowtown was a betting house, where she got a cash loan consisting of a handful of QUID and a card saying how much of the house’s money she had been allowed to hold.

The QUID, or Quasi-Universal Intergalactic Denomination, dated back to before the humans had discovered the vapor. Life on board ship was much more casual than the modern civilization that developed on the arcologies. Tetropolis’s central banking system, for example, enabled people to represent their monetary holdings with a stripe on a plastic card. On the ships, though, people had to represent their money with actual stuff that held actual value. Barter was the standard at the beginning, but this economy was quickly replaced with the QUID, a currency consisting of small plastic lozenges with colored balls embedded in them. The plastic was durable to prevent flakes of it from fragmenting and drifting into the instrumentation of the ship in microgravity, and it was expensive enough that it wasn’t economical to use it for anything else. The colored balls denoted the value of each coin, and each one had a unique serial number to prevent counterfeiting. Since the establishment of the central banks and card stripes as the standard medium of exchange, the QUID fell out of general use, but it was still used for small informal transactions between individuals or in small family-owned shops and the like. And of course, the Vaporwide Gambling Council maintained it as the customary means of tracking debts in every licensed gambling emporium in the vapor.

The small handful that Eve had managed to get wouldn’t go far, so she had to make the most of it. A few of them went toward the purchase of a needle, thread, and scissors, which she used to transform her new skirt into a pair of unusually baggy pants. She also bought a vial of silvery blue-green dye, which she used to change her hair color. She then wrapped her head with the leftover fragments of her skirt, completing her disguise as an esoteric artist. The appreciation of art, one way or the other, was widely recognized as the last definitive line between humans and robots, and she hoped that with her new appearance, everyone who looked at her would assume she was human without a second thought, and certainly not the fugitive robot that everyone was looking for. Even as she wandered around Shadowtown, she could see her official picture from Robot Production on screens everywhere she looked.